Customer Reviews

The World's Room: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
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3 star:		(1)
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I can't find enough words to describe this beautiful book. Do not be put off from the subject matter because this is not a depressing book! The main character loses his brother to suicide and shows how he and his family deal with grief and each other. I lost my brother to suicide as well and this book is a rare one where the siblings are discussed and not only the parents or children of the deceased. The author's characters and descriptions are perfect. I am recommending this book to all my friends and family.

I literally judged this book by its cover - the cover is uniquely creative, whimsical and moving. The book is all this and more. I don't want to bring it down to the level of pop psychology, but anyone who grew up with slightly (or extremely) nutty parents will recognize the conflicts children face as they struggle with their profound love for their adored parent, and their growing sense of betrayal by an irresponsible and selfish adult. London's account of a family swept up in the cultural maelstorm of the 60's while contending with madness in their family is very polished and self-assured. From time to time the book is overly structured - towards the end, in particular, he lets his gimmicks get the best of him - but overall, I was delighted to read it, and I'm shocked that it didn't get picked up by a bigger publisher. On the other hand, then it wouldn't have its charming cover.

This book is written with such grace, empathy, and authentic intelligence that I was captivated from the very first sentence. Todd London begins with a sequence of haunting, bitingly funny memories, then lodges them into a narrative groundwork that is both surprising and satisfying. This is a family story, told by the youngest and sanest member, but every character is fully, generously realized. The writing is so deft that we see the family clearly even when the narrator cannot. There is humor at every level - a kid's word games, a hilarious look at academic pretention, the pure situational absurdity of this family on the run. I got to the end and started over. The best book I've read in a long time.

This coming-of-age story is an odd mish-mash. It is well-written and features compelling characters and settings, yet it never really gels as a sustained narrative. I wonder if the title was a good idea. "The World's Room" refers to a second-hand shop the narrator's neurotic mother is forever hoping to open, in which to display all the tchotchkes and foreign junk she has amassed during their life on the road. As a metaphor for his first book, however, I fear that, like the narrator's mother with her shop, London has tried to stuff too much disparate material into the world of his novel. The first (and better) half of the book seems to be about the narrator's complex relationship to his older brother. But after the older brother commits suicide (an event we learn of in the novel's opening sentence), the narrative begins to slacken, and the novel reads more like someone's private journals modified lightly into fiction. Still, London has a strong prose style, and I look forward to reading his next book.